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Conversations in the Gym
Bicep curls, by Ron Burgundy. Yesterday I was chatted up by the manager of the gym where I (sometimes) work out. Cinco Pirouettas is a stout man in his forties who claims to have been a ballerino when he was young. He spends most of his time talking to girls at the machines. He also bosses around skinny young men who appear to have never lifted weights before. He sometimes talks to mothers. “Did you do ballet?” he asked me point blank one afternoon, about a month ago. I was stretching on the floor. Yes, I told him, a long, long time ago. He puffed up his chest. “I did ballet. How many pirouettes in a…
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Peruvian Cross-Country Skier Sets Sights on 2010 Games, Reports NY Times
The New York Times’ Inge Sheve reports on an underdog contender for the 2010 Winter Olympic Games. He’s 38-year-old Roberto Carcelen, a surfer and runner from Peru, who hopes to become the best cross-country skiier in South America, as well as his country’s first Olympic cross-country skier. (Carcelen trains in Seattle, where he lives with his American wife and their 16-month-old daughter.) A Skier’s Singular Pursuit by Inge Sheve, pub. Jan. 2, 2009 Roberto Carcelen is a runner and a surfer, which does not make him unusual in his home country, Peru, but his newest sport does. He is aiming to be the only Peruvian cross-country skier in the 2010 Olympics.…
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Conversations in the Gym
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Newest Superhero: A Soccer-playing Car Mechanic from Lima
I was so absorbed by the APEC brouhaha last month I missed the news that the world’s newest superhero hails from Lima. Santiago is a viewer-created superhero character who stars in four micro-episodes in Sprint’s online series Heroes: Destiny. More than one million people participated in the online series by selecting attributes for a male and a female character and voting for the winning hero. Scriptwriters fashioned a four-part story around the character and shot the series with live actors. Evidently, viewers were most intributed by the idea of a young working class guy from Lima possessing superpowers: Santiago is an ordinary young man living in Lima, Peru. Soccer is…
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Peru’s Female Weightlifters Suffer Anemia, Says Cristina Cornejo
Don’t tell this woman you just cut her team’s food allowance by 80 percent! My favorite Peruvian weightlifter – the mighty, mighty Cristina Cornejo — returned to Peru after participating in the Beijing Summer Olympics, with hopes of helping her fellow (sister?) weightlifters achieve new heights. Now it turns out the Peruvian weightlifters can barely train due to malnutrition. And our girl Cornejo is demanding that Peru help feed the athletes. According to a Nov. 7 item in Diario Correo, the Peruvian Institute of Sports (IPD) initially promised an ample food allowance for the 11 members of the national women’s weightlifting team. However, that allowance was drastically reduced after a…
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Conversations in the Gym
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Peruvian Maria Portilla Wins Baltimore Women’s Marathon
Great news for fans of María Portilla, the Andean-born marathon runner who represented Peru in the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympic Games. Maria Portilla (center) runs in the Baltimore Marathon / photo by Kristine Buls/Examiner Portilla won the Baltimore Women’s Marathon this past Saturday, October 11, with a time just shy of the Peruvian national record. The Baltimore Examiner reports: Maria Portilla of Peru won the women’s marathon in 2:36:32 — just short of the Peruvian world record of 3:35:19, which she set at the Beijing Olympics this summer. “After the half-mile point, I started to push hard,” Portilla said, adding she began to pull away around the 20-mile mark. Portilla,…
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Conversations in the Gym
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How Pitiful! Peru Spends 3 Soles per Peruvian on Sports
A recent article in El Comercio, summarized in English by reporter Israel Ruiz, exposes why Peru performs so abysmally in international sporting events like the Olympics. Here’s Ruiz’s complete story published today in Living in Peru: Peruvian sports are trapped in time, said reporters for El Comercio, explaining there were records in the Andean country that had not been broken in almost 40 years. Fernando Acevedo, one of Peru’s past athletes that has not had his records broken affirmed he was not proud of this or the difficult situation the country was facing. “The fact that no one has broken my records shows we have not progressed,” said Acevedo, explaining that without…
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Peru Olympian Sixto Barrera Honored by United Nations
Sixto Barrera carries Peru’s flag during Opening Ceremonies, Beijing Summer Olympic Games, August 2008 Peruvian wrestler Sixto Barrera, who represented his country in the Beijing Summer Olympic Games of 2008, was honored on August 26 by the United Nations, reports RPP Noticias. The wrestler was decorated by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) for setting an inspirational example for young people. “I am very grateful for the people who supported me and made possible my participation in the 2008 Beijing Olympics,” said Barrera after receiving the distinction by the representative of UNESCO in Peru, Katherine Muller. Peru’s “first guitarist,” Oscar Aviles (now 83 years old) The athlete also was congratulated by the renowned Peruvian Criolla musician…
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Conversations in the Gym
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Peru’s Porters Win Ausangate Gold Medal for Weightlifting
The Beijing 2008 Summer Olympics are officially over, the winners have scurried home with their medals, and the losing athletes are either chastised, pitied or forgotten by most of the world. No laurel wreath, no glory, the Olympic equation goes. Not on this blog, however. In the same spirit of honoring athletic excellence that inspired the first Olympic Games, An American in Lima introduces the Ausangate Awards for High-Altitude Athletic Achievement. Just as the Olympic Games are named after Greece’s highest mountain, Mount Olympus (2,919 meters above sea level), the Ausangate Awards take as their namesake the tallest peak in the Cordillera Vilcanota, Mount Ausangate (6,384 meters / 20,945 feet above…
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Lessons Learned Writing about Peru’s Olympians
Seventeen days ago I wrote a short post on “The Big Olympics and Little Peru,” about my shifting perspective, as an American expat in Lima, on the Olympic Games. I thought that one post would be it on the Olympics. Instead, as I dug for background material on Peru’s thirteen Olympians, I discovered that little was being written about the athletes in English. Not only that, Peru’s Spanish-language media outlets gave scant coverage to the Games. Newspapers in Lima were more focused on South American fútbol matches than track & field or gymnastics in Beijing. Faced with an information gap, I decided to fill in as best I could. I’m…
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Peru Olympic Wrap-up: Week 2 in Review
As I’m writing this post, Peru’s long-distance runner Constantino León is racing the last five kilometers of the Men’s Marathon (42.15 km), in Beijing’s National Stadium. Out of the 95 runners who began the race, only 82 remain, and León is 63rd at the 35-km mark. The first-, second- and third-place winners have just crossed the finish line: Kenya’s Samuel Wansiru wins the gold with the impressive time of 2:06:32, setting a new Olympic Record. At 44 seconds behind Wansiru, Jaouad Gharib of Morocco grabs the silver with 2:07:16 (he also breaks the previous OR), and Deriba Merga, of Ethiopia, wins the bronze with 2:10:00. It’s an African sweep. I…
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Conversations in the Gym
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Constantino Leon Last Olympian to Compete for Peru; Peter Lopez Misses Bronze in Taekwondo
Peru’s original field of 13 Olympic contenders is now down to one athlete: marathon runner Constantino Leon. Leon will compete Saturday, August 23, starting at 6:30 p.m. (Beijing time), in the Men’s Marathon. For fans in Peru, that translates to Sunday, August 24, starting at 7:30 a.m. Thus far, no athletes representing Peru have won a medal in the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. Constantino became Peru’s last Olympic contender after taekwondo athlete Peter Lopez failed to secure the bronze in the Men’s 68 kg. competition on Thursday, August 21. Lopez was victorious in his first two matches on Thursday, beating Australia’s Burak Hasan 3-1 in the preliminaries and Nigeria’s Isah Adam Mohammad…
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Conversations in the Gym
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María Portilla: I Am Thrilled to Have Given My All in Beijing
I'm very happy because I gave it my all, and everything went well. I am happy -- very happy. The weather was good; happily I improved my time, and that's very gratifying," Portilla told RPP News on Sunday.
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Conversations in the Gym
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The Buzz on Peru’s Olympians, Week 1 in Review, Aug. 9 – 16
The first week (August 10 – 16) of competition at the Beijing 2008 Olympics saw some encouraging efforts by Peruvian athletes but no medals. Here is a roundup of how Peru’s 13-member Olympic delegation has performed so far, along with buzz about the athletes from English-speaking media, bloggers and fans. (Plus blog reactions by Peru athletes like Peter Lopez, who posted the photo above on his Olympic blog “Camino a la Gloria” (Road to Glory) on Monday, Aug. 11.) SIXTO BARRERA / WRESTLING Wrestler Sixto Barrera, considered by many to be Peru’s best chance for a medal, got off to a strong start on Tuesday (Aug. 12), when he trounced the…
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Conversations in the Gym
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Olympic Ceviche with a Political Bite – Pescados Capitales
The ultra-hip cevicheria Pescados Capitales, one of Lima's finest seafood restaurants, plays on the Beijing Summer Olympics theme in its current "Pescados Olímpicos" (Olympic Sins) menu.
